


Find Me

by TheSigyn



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 08:03:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4514283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Find me, if you need to, one day. Find me,” Sarah Jane said. Alone, confused, searching for the Doctor, Rose decides to do just that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

  
“Is this the home of Sarah Jane Smith?” asked the blonde woman at the door.   
  
“May I ask who’s calling?” asked the teenage boy who had opened it. He had a satchel on his back was wearing a school uniform — clearly just on his way out.  
  
“Tell her it’s an old friend, and ask how K-9's doing.”   
  
“Oh,” said the boy, and his entire demeanor changed. He had looked very wary before. “You’d better come in, then.” He opened the door wide and showed her into a exotically decorated sitting room. There were artifacts from India and Sri Lanka and Venezuela and Japan. Some of them were hundreds of years old. “Mum!” the boy called up the stairs. “You’ve got a visitor.”   
  
The boy started up the stairs. She didn’t catch what Sarah Jane called down, but she heard the boy’s reply. “Probably someone from UNIT. I don’t recognize her, but she smells alien.”   
  
The woman sniffed her sleeve. She didn’t catch anything unusual.   
  
“Luke!” A dark haired girl looked in a the open door, wearing the same uniform. “We’ll be late. You coming?”   
  
“Hey, Maria. Nice to meet you. Sorry to be going,” he added to the woman, and skirted out the door.   
  
Mere seconds later Sarah Jane Smith came swiftly down the stairs. She blinked when she saw her. “Rose?” she said.   
  
Rose held out her arms a little uncertainly, half a greeting, half a shrug. She wasn’t at all sure how she was going to be received.   
  
“Rose!” Sarah Jane came forward and took her shoulders warmly. “It’s so nice to see you.”  
  
“Hello, Sarah Jane,” Rose said. She sighed with relief. She and Sarah Jane were on friendly terms... that didn’t mean that Rose didn’t think of her with envy. It was Sarah Jane that had shattered Rose’s delusion that Rose was the only woman in the Doctor’s life — which considering he was nine hundred years old had been a ludicrous assumption. Every time she looked at Sarah Jane she thought — did she get what I wanted? How many others were there? It always made her wonder what she had meant to the Doctor.   
  
They greeted each other warmly. “Who’s that boy?” Rose asked.   
  
“Luke is my son,” Sarah Jane said with pride. “I adopted him a few months ago.”   
  
“He said I smell like an alien. How much does he know?”   
  
“More than you or I could possibly imagine,” Sarah Jane said with a laugh. “He has augmented senses. He probably scented some kind of power source. How did you get here?”   
  
Rose held up her dimensional teleport. “Long story. I came because I need your help. I need to find the Doctor.”   
  
Sarah Jane nodded, but she didn’t look surprised. “Why did he leave you behind?” she asked.   
  
“He didn’t leave me behind!” Rose snapped angrily. But then she felt uncomfortable. “We were separated,” she said. “He couldn’t come for me, he couldn’t. And I couldn’t get back to him.” She fidgeted nervously. Her heart was broken, and she couldn’t find him. She’d gotten to the right universe, and somehow she had had the idea that the Doctor would be right there, waiting for her. It hadn’t happened that way.   
  
“There’s no need to get angry,” Sarah Jane said. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”   
  
Rose took a deep breath, and explained all the details of the battle of Canary Wharf and Torchwood and how Rose was separated — much of this did not seem entirely unknown to Sarah Jane — and how she was, now, managing to travel back into this dimension. “But it’s only working because everything is coming apart, and I need to find him. The Doctor. Because he’s the only one who can stop it. I don’t suppose you know how to contact him?”   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head sadly. “In my experience,” she said, “when you’re looking for him is the last time you’ll ever find the Doctor.”   
  
“Except when there’s trouble,” Rose said. “And there’s trouble. I know it’s coming. It’s already touched the universe I’m coming from — it’ll be here soon enough. I need to find him. Track his movements. Anything. Is there NOTHING you can do to help?”   
  
Sarah Jane frowned, and then nodded. “Maybe. Come with me.”   
  
Sarah led Rose up the stairs and into her attic. “Mr. Smith! I need you!” she announced, and with a renowned fanfare, Mr. Smith unfolded himself from the wall.   
  
“Mr. Smith. I need you to scan for any known or suspected activity of the Doctor on Earth in the last...?” She looked at Rose.   
  
“Eighteen months,” Rose said.   
  
“Eighteen months,” Sarah Jane repeated. “Look up UNIT, Torchwood, independent sightings, anything.”   
  
“Certainly Sarah Jane,” Mr. Smith said in his cool, dangerous voice. “Scanning.”   
  
After a few minutes Mr. Smith came up with a map and a list of dates. “There has been one confirmed sighting of the TARDIS in Cardiff eleven months ago, just after the assassination of Prime Minister Saxon. There has been one sighting of the Doctor during the Adipose incident in London.” He continued listing occurrences which might or might not have had anything to do with the Doctor.   
  
Rose was disappointed. Mr. Smith hadn’t told her anything her version of Torchwood hadn’t already been able to figure out. “So, there you have it,” Sarah Jane said. “He was definitely here recently. I remember some trouble with the Sontarans — they ALWAYS keep coming back for more! — but according to Mr. Smith there hasn’t been any activity since.”   
  
“What am I going to do?” Rose said. “I need to track the TARDIS through time and space, and there’s no way of doing that!”   
  
“Hm,” Sarah Jane said. She looked over at her clock. “I might have someone who can help you with that. K-9 has a lot of files on the TARDIS in his data banks. But the singularity cycle isn’t going to be active for another hour, and we can’t talk to him until then. Can you wait that long?”   
  
Rose shrugged. “I suppose I’ll have to.”   
  
“Fine. In the meantime, help me with these files.” She pulled a box out from beneath her desk and pointed at another one. Rose bent down and pulled it out. The boxes had the letters U.N.I.T. scrawled on them in official looking stencil.   
  
“What are these?”   
  
“Old UNIT files from when I knew the Doctor,” Sarah Jane said. “I know for a fact I have a timeline of the universe here, somewhere, with a focus on Earth. The Doctor scrawled it off for me one night in a flurry of impatience at my questions. Now, history is in flux, but it might be helpful to see if there’s anything catastrophic that we can zero in on that we’d be SURE the Doctor is bound to see.”   
  
“It’s a long shot.”   
  
“But it’s a shot,” Sarah Jane said. “I think it’s in this one, but check that one. It would be on seventeen sheets of old printer paper — you know, the kind that had holes on the edges, from back in the eighties.”   
  
Rose blinked. “Most of this is on printer paper.”   
  
“So you’d better get scanning, then.”   
  
Rose pulled out dusty sheets with “U.N.I.T. TOP SECRET” stamped on them. “Why don’t you get all this scanned into your computer?”   
  
“Computers alter,” Sarah Jane said. “They get hacked, they get obsolete, they loose power. These stay the same.” Then she shrugged. “Besides. Some of it is hard to catalogue.” She kept leafing through the papers.   
  
Rose had the tough box, she realized. It was filled with incomprehensible tickertape and pieces of paper with old shards of pottery taped to them. She tried to sort out the pages of printer paper, but many of those were misleading. Rose had never had much patience — she was more of an action type of girl — and this bored her. She sighed as she piled up useless page after useless page. Then she picked up a file, and a photograph fell out.   
  
The photograph was of Sarah Jane, looking very young, sitting beside an older man with an iron grey head in a red velvet coat. Sarah Jane was smiling at the camera, but the old man was looking at Sarah Jane in a protective, fatherly way. Rose couldn’t see his face very clearly, but she liked him. She held the picture out. “Is that your dad?”   
  
Sarah Jane looked over at the photograph Rose was holding. “No,” she said with a small smile. “That’s the Doctor.” 


	2. Chapter 2

  
  
Rose blinked. “THAT’S the Doctor?” she asked, staring at the picture. She swallowed. “But he looks so old!” She couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice.   
  
“He’s not young,” Sarah reminded her.   
  
“But look at him!”   
  
“Have you never seen him with grey hair?”   
  
Rose shook her head.   
  
“He’s been dying young,” Sarah Jane mused. “That’s not the best picture I have of him,” she added. “That’s why it’s still in the file. Here.” She opened a cupboard in the desk and pulled a framed picture from inside it.  
  
Rose noted that the picture was hidden, like in a shrine. Sarah Jane would have to open the door to look upon him.   
  
“There he is,” Sarah Jane said, and smiled down at the photograph. The same older man was in it, his face much more visible, leaning against an antique yellow car. “I took that picture, just outside UNIT headquarters,” Sarah Jane said. “That car was called Bessie. He loved it. Used to travel all around the countryside in it. It ended up on Gallifrey once. We had a DEVIL of a time getting it back into the TARDIS so he could get it back to earth.”   
  
Rose was shocked. “You saw Gallifrey? Before it was destroyed?”   
  
“Before and after are a bit of a complicated concept with time travel,” Sarah Jane said. “But yes, I ended up on Gallifrey once. Kind of by accident. Certainly not by my own design.” She looked a bit wistful. “That was the last time I saw him, actually. Until recently, with you. Sometime in the eighties.” Her eyes were distant as she said, “And when he left, he didn’t even know he was saying goodbye.”   
  
Rose felt a clench in her heart. At least the Doctor had said goodbye to her — burned up a star to say goodbye. “What do you mean?”   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “Our time was off synch, and I couldn’t explain. It was an earlier regeneration, and I already knew him after.”   
  
“Wait a minute, what?”   
  
Sarah Jane sighed. It was such a patient, patronizing sigh that Rose was reminded of the Doctor. Sarah actually did make Rose feel very foolish. In truth, Rose really hadn’t done much with her life until she met the Doctor. She was becoming increasingly aware that Sarah Jane was the kind of woman who would have had an amazing life, with or without the Doctor in it.   
  
“Did you ever see him regenerate?” Sarah asked.   
  
“Yes,” Rose said.   
  
“Well, it would be as if, right now, you saw your old Doctor, when you knew that in, say, a year, he would change. You’re in his past, and he’s in your future.”   
  
“Oh!” Rose understood. “Actually, I’m having to work around that right now, trying to find him. I know a few places where the Doctor will be, but it’s in his past, and if I break up the time line—”  
  
“You’ll destroy the universe instead of saving it,” Sarah Jane said. “Well, someone was being reckless. Someone was breaking the laws of time all around him so there were five of him in one place — very dangerous — so I had to be very careful what I said. Not give anything of his own future away. He left me when I should be, and went back to when he should be. As far as he was concerned, I was there, waiting for him, back then. But I was never to see him again.” She smiled. “It was nice to see him, anyway. Even if he was too young to remember everything we’d shared together.”   
  
She sounded so wistful and sad that Rose wanted to help. All she could think of was to do as she had done before — there were things that never changed, and the two of them could still laugh over the Doctor’s eccentricities. “What’s with that shirt?” Rose laughed. “Look at him! When was this?”   
  
“Nineteen eighty.”   
  
“You should have told him ruffles went out of fashion in the eighteen hundreds!”   
  
“I tried, he wore ruffles and velvet every day. Like a romantic poet. I quite liked it, actually.”  
  
“When I first knew him, he had a leather jacket.” Rose chuckled. “Looked like a U-boat captain.”   
  
Sarah chuckled too, but it was sad. “You want eccentric, try this one,” Sarah said. She pulled out another photograph from the same hidden shrine. Rose wondered what else was in there. Sarah gazed wistfully at the photograph herself for a moment, hesitating before she passed it over. “That was after he regenerated,” Sarah Jane said, and if anything, her voice was even sadder.   
  
Rose took the photograph and stared at it. The Doctor looked younger this time, with a certain madness to his eyes, a nose that would have put Rose’s first Doctor to shame, and more teeth than seemed possible to fit into his face. He wore a strange brown hat and a waistcoat under a tweed jacket with elbow protection. And — “How long is that scarf?”   
  
“About eighteen feet,” Sarah Jane said. “Never took it off, outside the TARDIS.”   
  
Rose had actually seen that scarf — or something similar — in the TARDIS wardrobe. She’d thought it was funny at the time. “Always?” she asked.   
  
“Always,” Sarah Jane said. “He said it was made by Lady Nostrodamus, but you know he’ll say anything. Saved my life a few times, that scarf. Pulled me out of some precarious situations.”   
  
But Rose wasn’t really listening. She was staring. Sarah Jane was in the photograph, standing beside the Doctor. She was young, barely into her twenties, her face fresh, her body lithe and slim. She was dressed in clothes that seemed just as outlandish to Rose as the Doctor’s, seventies’ fashions and prim makeup. But the two of them together looked, somehow, RIGHT. The Doctor was not gazing at her with fatherly fondness now. There was an easiness to how this Doctor had his arm around her, something wild and delighted in his face. And Sarah Jane was a mirror, the same expressions, the same light to the eyes, even their hair a matching brown. She had never seen a couple who looked more suited to each other. It looked like...   
  
It looked like a photograph from a honeymoon.   
  
Rose trembled. Things had gotten more heated between her and the Doctor after his regeneration. She had a terrible feeling that the same had happened to Sarah Jane. She gulped. “Did things — change — after he regenerated?” Rose asked.   
  
Sarah Jane nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “It was strange. He seemed so much younger.” She gazed down at the photograph. “He was quite fatherly to me in some ways, before the regeneration. I actually found it quite offensive. Then he started to trust me. Then we got closer. Then...” Sarah Jane’s voice was so soft and private that Rose felt as if she was eavesdropping on her thoughts. “I sometimes wonder if he chose to regenerate. For me. He didn’t have to go, you know. He walked into death, and when he came back he came to me. Height of hubris, but... sometimes I wonder. Because it all became so easy after that. As if we were made for each other.” She sighed. “Until it ended,” she added, and turned away.   
  
Every one of those could have been Rose’s words. She loved the Doctor. Every corner of her being loved the Doctor. She knew the Doctor loved her — she knew it, even though he had never said it — but she hadn’t been with him very long. “How long were you with him?” Rose asked.   
  
“I’m not sure,” Sarah Jane said, leafing through her records. “I didn’t keep track of the time. At least three years. Maybe six. It was hard to tell, bouncing around so much.”   
  
“I bounced around, too,” Rose said.   
  
“Yes, but... oh, it was complicated. The TARDIS almost NEVER went where he said it was going to go,” Sarah Jane said. “Though I think most of the time he missed the target on purpose. We’d pop in to go to London one afternoon and eight months and a hundred adventures later we’d finally make it — a hundred years too early.” Sarah laughed.   
  
Rose’s personal time frame had been meticulously recorded by her cell phone. She knew she had been with the Doctor one year, three months and twenty seven days. That Sarah Jane wasn’t even sure was a vastly different way of judging. “How did it end?” Rose asked.   
  
Sarah Jane looked at her. The pain was very controlled in her face, but it was still there behind the steel. “The Time Lords ended it, I think. They used to control him a great deal.” She looked down. “I guess we were getting too close. You can’t tell me they didn’t know I was with him, and why else call him then, when they had all eternity?” Sarah Jane shook her head. “They had the power of life and death over him. He feared them, but he couldn’t win against them. They controlled him, more than he would ever admit. He used to shout at them, railing fruitlessly at the skies.” She shook her head. “It’s a shame they’re gone, really, I always thought he needed someone to hate. An establishment to fight against.”   
  
“Hate?” Rose had never heard anything like this before. “The Doctor hated the Time Lords?”   
  
“With a passion,” Sarah said. “You didn’t know this?”   
  
Rose shook her head. “No,” she said. “They make him so sad, even thinking about them. I thought.... You mean they weren’t all like him? Protecting planets, saving lives, making the universe better...?”   
  
“Not at all. They were very pedantic. Strict non-interference. The Doctor hated that, and they hated him. They banished him to Earth, you know. Broke the TARDIS, tampered with his memory, made him unable to control it. He was forced to get a job.”   
  
Rose gave out a yip of laughter. The idea of the Doctor with a job was comical.   
  
“It wasn’t funny,” Sarah Jane said. She shook her head. “Why do you think he loved that car so much? The TARDIS was useless to him. I wasn’t there, but he’s spoken of it, and my friend Alistair watched it. He was Earthbound. I think it nearly drove him mad. Like keeping a wolf on a leash. He hid it, but he would have chewed his own leg off to get free.”   
  
“Bad wolf,” Rose whispered.   
  
“No,” Sarah Jane said. “Lone wolf. But the memory lock was broken in time. And he was able to take me anywhere.” She smiled sadly. “Anywhere but Gallifrey.” She shook her head and went back to her papers. “If it didn’t make him so sad, I’d be happy they were dead.”   
  
“That’s awfully cruel.”   
  
“So were they,” Sarah Jane said. She looked over at Rose. “Did you ever see him... did you ever see the veneer crack? Did you ever see him let someone die and at the end say only, ‘I warned him’?”   
  
“No,” Rose said, but she was in denial, and she knew it. Every once in a while there was something inhumanly cold about the Doctor. But Rose was young, and hot, and she refused to admit it. The Doctor was perfect. Perfect. There was nothing that could be imperfect about him. Everything he touched was made better for it.   
  
“He has it in him to do that,” Sarah Jane said. “And I think you know that. He can be so frightening. It’s better to admit that and accept it than deny it. The Time Lords were like the Doctor. But unlike him, they seemed to have no heart.”   
  
“Two hearts,” Rose said.   
  
“His hearts can feel,” Sarah Jane said. “Pain and anger and curiosity and compassion and love. I sometimes doubt if theirs could.”   
  
“Did he love you?” Rose whispered. She couldn’t believe she was asking this. Whether the answer was yes or no, saying it could only hurt Sarah Jane, and hearing it could only hurt Rose. But she needed to ask.   
  
“He loves everyone.” Sarah Jane avoided the question. “That’s his gift and his curse.”   
  
“But were you... the two of you... were you together?”   
  
“In more ways than I could ever have imagined,” Sarah Jane said quietly.  
  
She wasn’t quite answering the question. But Rose found she didn’t want to know the answer. The Doctor had never told Rose that he loved her. Never even kissed her, not that she could remember. There was one misty, dreamy memory tangled into what she could remember of having looked into the heart of the TARDIS — but that was so surreal she couldn’t be sure of it. And then there was that time Cassandra had used Rose’s body and grabbed him on New Earth, but Rose only remembered that as she would have someone else’s story of a kiss — it hadn’t really been her. She stood there shaking, and her love for him overwhelmed her.   
  
Suddenly, Sarah Jane was there holding her shoulders, and Rose realized she was crying. “I miss him!” Rose whispered, and Sarah pulled her close. Rose cried on the mature woman’s shoulder, heartbroken and utterly unable to control herself. “What am I going to do? I’m nothing without him.” She finally looked up as she regained her composure. “Was it like this for you?” she asked. “Losing him? Did your life end? Did you cry into your pillow and night and look and look and look for him?”  
  
“No,” Sarah Jane said evenly. “I would have found that too self-indulgent. My aunt raised me not to feel sorry for myself.” Despite the harsh words, her face held no judgement. “No. I just waited. I went about my life and I made myself useful. Sometimes I would stare up into the stars and think of him. I knew he would come back for me. Until I was sure he wouldn’t. And Rose, when he did come back... it wasn’t for me.” Sarah Jane touched Rose’s cheek. “He moves on. He has to.”   
  
“No!” Rose barked. “He said he wouldn’t. Not to me.”   
  
“He says a lot of things,” Sarah Jane said gently.  
  
“Did he say he loved you?” Rose asked — demanded, really.   
  
“If the Doctor means it,” Sarah Jane said, “he won’t say it.”   
  
Rose didn’t understand that, so she dismissed it. “I don’t know how to find him,” she sobbed. “And we have to find him. The walls of the universe are breaking down and the stars are going out, and we have to find him!”   
  
“Maybe you should accept that you can’t,” Sarah Jane said. “Maybe you should just accept that it’s time you moved on as well. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn to be with him now. Would you take that from her? — or him? Or them?” She glared at Rose. “Could you be so cruel?”   
  
Rose stared up at Sarah Jane and her tears stopped dead. Sarah Jane’s face was steel and her eyes were iron and she looked as strong as a mountain and generous as sleep. Rose choked. “You didn’t.... Oh, God,” she breathed. She stepped away and began pacing, clenching her hands in horror. “Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God.” She turned back to her. “You. When he asked you. You said no.”   
  
Sarah Jane nodded, once.   
  
“I didn’t realize.” Rose’s self-conceit disgusted her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it at the time. “Don’t tell me you told him no — for me.”   
  
Sarah Jane’s glare sharpened and she turned away. “I was moving on,” she said brusquely. “I had a life on earth. I hadn’t found Luke yet, but I knew there were adventures to be found here.” She shook her head. “It was time for me to let go.”   
  
Rose wasn’t fooled. “If I hadn’t been there. If the Doctor had been alone, when he asked you to come with him — would you have gone?”   
  
Sarah Jane didn’t answer. 


	3. Chapter 3

  
  
“Just tell me the truth,” Rose demanded. “If I wasn’t there, would you have gone with him?”   
  
Sarah Jane prevaricated. “I wouldn’t now,” she said. “I have Luke, and I love him more than life itself. Luke deserves a normal childhood, or as normal as possible. That means here, on earth, with school and friends and skateboards.”  
  
Rose insisted. “You haven’t answered my question.”   
  
Sarah frowned at her. “Why do you need to know?”   
  
Rose pursed her lips. “I spoke to him about you,” she said. “When I said I was willing for you to come with us he looked so happy. And then after we left without you, he got so strange... it was like he could barely look at me.”   
  
“Do you think everything’s about you?” Sarah Jane asked.   
  
Rose glared. Sarah Jane sounded exactly like Jackie! She was NOT Rose’s mother, she was not allowed to say things like that. “This is about him,” Rose snapped.   
  
“No, it’s not,” Sarah Jane said. “This is about us. You’re trying to figure out if we’re the same. I don’t know. But I do know we’re not alone. Mr. Smith has identified four other TARDIS keys on this planet, possibly more. He moves. On. Rose.”   
  
Rose shook her head. “He doesn’t,” she said.   
  
Sarah Jane looked away, but Rose caught her rolling her eyes.   
  
“I’m neither an idiot, nor in denial!” Rose said.   
  
Sarah Jane scowled, and then stuck her tongue out at Rose, like a ten year old girl. Rose giggled. She suddenly saw exactly what it was that made the Doctor love her so much. “He didn’t stop caring about you, Sarah Jane. He can’t have.”  
  
“I know he didn’t,” Sarah said. “But....” Sarah Jane bowed her head and sighed. Her face was tight with pain. “I looked at you,” she said evenly, “and I saw so much of myself. And I looked at him... and I saw so little of him. He had changed so much, his face so young, his eyes so heavy. And it wasn’t the regeneration — I’ve been through that. I’ve known two faces intimately, I’ve met five of him in my time — six, including this one.” Rose cringed. Sarah Jane knew so much! Six regenerations? She must have been an immense part of his life.   
  
But Sarah Jane’s next words heartened Rose a little. “He just wasn’t my Doctor anymore. He was yours.” She shrugged. “If there had been no one... he would have needed me. And if he needed me....” She shook her head. “But he didn’t need me. He had you.”   
  
“So you would have come,” Rose said. “If I hadn’t been there.”   
  
“Yes,” Sarah Jane finally admitted. “I would have come. I could have abandoned my life here in a second, there wasn’t much to lose. I wanted to.” She closed her eyes and turned her face to the sky. “I wanted to so much, it burned.” She shook her head. “But the Doctor changed me, all those years ago. He taught me selflessness. And wisdom. And I couldn’t change back into the girl I was before I knew him. She would have gone. But I’m not her anymore. And I couldn’t bring myself to do that to him, to make him watch me die. I couldn’t bring myself to take away or disrupt what you had together. Or to see in his face every day that what we had had really was finally and completely over, and I was just clutching a corpse.” She bowed her head again. “I couldn’t bear to watch myself die through his eyes. I couldn’t bear to take away your life with him.”   
  
“But what if what he really wanted was you?” Rose whispered. “He’d never ask.” Her voice grew so small that Sarah Jane barely heard it. “He’d never say he needed you.”  
  
“He doesn’t need to say it,” Sarah Jane said. “Not to me. I know him, Rose. If he had needed me... he would have asked me to come. He wouldn’t have merely offered. But all he did was open the door, he didn’t take my hand and draw me through. And you’ve never seen him... how he used to look at me with those puppydog eyes, just begging me to come through that door. All he did was smile. And that was a memory. I know him too well, Rose. He didn’t need me. He cares for me, but I was hurting him. I was reminding him of things he didn’t want to remember.” She shook her head. “You don’t do that to him. You don’t carry painful memories on your shoulders. I could see that when he looked at you.”  
  
Rose opened her mouth, but Sarah Jane cut her off. “Rose... I know him very, very well. You’re young. You’re so young. You’re hurt by the things he won’t say. But he can’t say it, not it words, and so you can’t hear it. I hear it. In my heart or in my mind, I don’t know how, but I’ve heard it... even before he regenerated I could hear it. There are so many things he doesn’t need to say. There was only one thing I wanted him to say, and that was Goodbye. A real goodbye. I needed it to be over. Because it was over. I couldn’t hurt him and you and myself again just because I was selfish. I couldn’t try to hold on to what was no longer mine.”   
  
“Do you think,” Rose said, “that he’s no longer mine?”   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe your fate will be different than mine.” She reached out to touch Rose’s young cheek. “But he can’t be yours forever. He belongs to the universe. And we can’t be selfish when it comes to the Doctor. We have to let him move on.”   
  
“How many of us have there been?” Rose asked.   
  
“His assistants?”  
  
Rose glared. “I was not his assistant!”   
  
“That’s what he called me,” Sarah Jane said. “And Jo and Liz Shaw. But he had a job then, remember? We worked with him. Or they did — he kind of picked me up, unofficially. Mike Yeats and Harry Sullivan traveled with him for a while, they were from UNIT. He took the Brigadier to Gallifrey. There was woman called Tegan, and a man named Turlough. He needs an entourage. I’m sure there have been dozens. Possibly hundreds. It’s been a long time since I knew him. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know.”   
  
“I don’t know anything,” Rose whimpered. “He’d never talk about his past. He’d drop one line here, a bombshell there. He told me his planet died in the Time War, just after I met him. He said he’d been a father once, accidentally. I know nothing about him. He didn’t talk about you. He didn’t talk about UNIT, and clearly he was with them a long time. He never said he was a — a lone wolf. That he defied his people. I thought he loved them. I didn’t have any idea!” Her face crumpled. “Who am I chasing?”   
  
“Yes,” Sarah Jane said. “Who. You can’t know him. Like you can’t know his name. I know a little. I know what he doesn’t need to say, but that’s all emotion, not history. There are centuries I don’t know. He wasn’t afraid of his past before, true, and he told me some things. But he’s been through a lot of pain, I can tell. I think you bore the brunt of it, all that pain. And his past is hidden behind it, so he can’t see it without facing the pain first.” She ran her fingers down Rose’s hair. “I suspect, Rose... that you helped him forget.”   
  
“But I didn’t know!” Rose said. “You mean he spent all his life hating his people, and now they’re gone...?”   
  
“A classic case of be careful what you wish for,” Sarah Jane said. She took a deep breath. “I can tell you what I know. That’s precious little. I know he stole the TARDIS, centuries ago, and was banished to the cosmos by his own people. Him and his granddaughter, Susan. Or that's the name she went by. She was fifteen at the time. I met her, once. She was sweetness itself, but brilliant and steady. A deep pool of stillness and strength. I suppose she’s dead now.” She kept touching Rose, smoothing away her tears, like a child. “Susan was the first to travel with him. I suspect that almost everyone he invites to go with him reminds him, somehow, of her.”   
  
Rose took a deep breath. She didn’t want to be the Doctor’s surrogate grandchild. She had hoped for so much more.   
  
“I can guess that he blames himself for the Time War.”   
  
Rose looked up.   
  
“He had the opportunity to destroy the daleks before they were created,” Sarah Jane told her. “I was there. It didn’t happen that way. And now the Time Lords are gone.” She looked down at Rose, and her eyes were heavy. “Do you really need him to face all that pain, to tell you who he is?”   
  
“No.” Rose shook her head.   
  
“I thought not.” Sarah Jane swallowed.   
  
Sarah Jane might be steel, but her pain showed in her eyes. And Rose wasn’t heartless. “You shouldn’t have to face that pain, either,” Rose said. “I’m so sorry.”   
  
Sarah Jane shook her head. “You think I’m like you,” she said. “I’m not.” She looked down at Rose, as if looking at a child. “I missed him. He was my life, he became life. But my life didn’t end when I lost him. I had an entire world to explore, and I seized it. I was waiting, but it was active waiting. You young people have it so easy. When I was young I had to fight for every step. Even kind men were patronizing, calling me ‘the fair sex’, and talking down to me as if I was a simpleton. I nearly slugged Harry Sullivan so many times!” She chuckled. “The Doctor used to announce he was an imbecile quite loudly. Micky actually reminded me of Harry quite a bit. He was a bit silly.”   
  
“Micky isn’t silly anymore,” Rose said, and she couldn’t hide the regret in her voice. She had broken Micky’s heart, unable to forget the Doctor. He had buffed himself up, become a crack shot with a gun, and his face had turned pointed and hard. She could barely hug him. It hurt him too much. “He’s a soldier now. But I’m.... How did you do it? Really, Sarah, how did you walk on each day without knowing you were walking back to him?”   
  
Sarah shrugged. “I didn’t need to the Doctor to be Sarah Jane Smith. I worked for Reuters, I journeyed through warzones, I tracked down murderous cults, and all of that was without the Doctor. I fought my way as a journalist, one of the few serious female journalists in Britain, when I was as young as twenty-three. Before I ever met the Doctor.” Her eyes narrowed. “If you’re not enough without the Doctor, Rose... what good are you going to be to him when you find him?”   
  
Now Rose knew why she had hated Sarah Jane on sight. She was too insightful by half! And unfortunately... she also knew why the Doctor had cared for her. “He needs me,” Rose insisted.   
  
“For whatever reason, you’re what he needed,” Sarah Jane said. “For whatever reason, he saw something in you. But you need to find it without him. You need to be enough on your own.”   
  
An alarum went off across the room, saving Rose from the burden of having to find an answer.   
  
“Ah!” Sarah Jane darted forward and opened a safe set into the wall. “K-9! Young Rose here needs a copy of the TARDIS operation codes. Can you transfer them to her dimensional teleport?”   
  
The mechanical dog floated in the darkness beside the singularity. “Inquiry. Why does the young Mistress need the TARDIS codes?”   
  
“To track the Doctor,” Rose said eagerly.   
  
“Accessing....” K-9 said, and his ears rotated. “Transferring now.”   
  
Rose smiled as the information streamed into her device. Sarah Jane explained why K-9 was in the safe, and Rose shuddered to think of the danger if K-9 was unable to maintain the singularity. After Sarah Jane closed the safe back up again, Rose shook her head. “It’s a good thing the Doctor let you bring K-9 when the Time Lords called him.”   
  
Sarah Jane smiled. “He left K-9 for me later,” Sarah Jane said. “As a present. I’m still not sure why.”   
  
Rose glanced at her. “You mean he did come back?”   
  
Sarah Jane looked wistful. “Let us say, he didn’t forget.” Sarah Jane pulled the photograph of her and the Doctor out of Rose’s hand. “He’ll never forget.” She touched Rose on the shoulder. “He’ll never forget you, either. Even if you never manage to find him. Know that.”   
  
Rose nodded. She envied Sarah Jane. She envied her years with the Doctor. She envied her certainty and her strength and her self-reliance. Rose was going to find the Doctor... but if she didn’t, she was going to be like Sarah. Complete in herself.   
  
She was going to try, anyway.   
  
  
***  
  
  
Sarah Jane watched the young woman zap into non-existence back to her dimension, and shook her head. She didn’t wonder what the Doctor saw in that woman — she knew exactly. Rose must have been like a mental tonic-bath. She was entirely self-absorbed, wildly devoted, and bouncy as a spotted pup. She was tearing the universe apart with that device, trying to find the Doctor. Selfish. Rose wasn’t a fool, and she was wildly brave, but she was reckless and rash and faithful. It must have been like having a cheerleader.   
  
The Doctor had such a great brain, it must have been refreshing to have someone with so fresh and clear a mind to bounce off of. The clarity probably helped him to see. She was the perfect person to help him forget everything. The Doctor loved youth. It kept him young. Rose was likely to stay “young” for the next twenty years.   
  
Sarah Jane sighed. She was no longer young. But unlike Rose Tyler, she was her own self, unique and strong and ambitious. Sarah Jane didn’t need the Doctor to be someone. Even while she was waiting she had a social order to change, wars to cover, a world to explore. Rose, on the other hand. Rose’s only ambition was to be with the Doctor again. Poor girl.   
  
Even if she found the Doctor, and spent the rest of her life with him... Sarah Jane did not envy the girl. 


End file.
